Jewelry is often given at special occasions, such as birthdays, anniversaries, vacations, and other memorable life events. Those that receive such gifts often wish to preserve and relive these memories; however, the moment itself is often not recorded or the recording is lost among numerous other recordings thereby losing its intended close association with the jewelry. Thus, it would be beneficial to develop articles of jewelry that are able store memories themselves as retrievable digital files.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology commonly used for tracking purposes, often to replace bar codes. RFID tags contain an antenna and memory that stores data. Identifying or reading the data is accomplished using an RFID reader. RFID tags are widespread in the retail industry by helping stores keep track of inventory. RFID tags have also been incorporated into pearls. In WO2005/015986, a method of making a pearl is demonstrated where an RFID chip is fixed to the surface of the nucleus before the nucleus is inserted into the pearl oyster. This prevents identifying information specific to each pearl from being erased for tracking or classification purposes. Similarly, CN102332106B provides an approach to identify and manage pearls by embedding an RFID chip in a pearl for identification purposes. The RFID chip is added after boring into the pearl because the chip could be easily damaged if provided as part of a nucleus.
Near field communication (NFC) is a more finely honed version of RFID. It operates within a maximum range of about 4-10 cm and can operate in one- or two-way communication. NFC communication involves the modulation of a magnetic field between two devices, commonly referred to as an initiator and target. The initiator generates the RF field and the target modulates the field using power from the initiator. NFC-enabled features are now commonly integrated into smart phones. This technology is also being adopted for financial transactions where touching a NFC smart phone to a NFC checkout terminal, instructs payment, thereby replacing credit cards. In addition, data can be shared directly between NFC smart phones by just tapping phones together.
A challenge with NFC antenna design is that performance of the NFC antenna is degraded when positioning the NFC chip near electrically conductive metals. While RFID tags have been used to track pearls, pearls are nonconductive. That is, the nacre coating does not conduct electricity. To this end, the mere substitution of the pearl's nacre coating with desirable previous metals that are highly electrically conductive, such as silver or gold, would not be appropriate for an NFC embedded chip since it prevents communication between an NFC chip and an NFC enabled device.
Even if challenges associated with incorporating an NFC chip into metallic jewelry so that data can be read is accomplished, a further challenge involves the protection of privacy and security of the data stored on the NFC chip. That is, data stored on an NFC chip is inherently at risk of theft by unauthorized reading by others. This can be especially challenging because jewelry is typically worn so that it is highly visible to others. Thus, outward display of jewelry that incorporates an NFC chip could direct a thief precisely to the location of the NFC chip for data theft. Similarly, NFC chips are also at risk of malicious writing, where programming is unknowingly transferred to the NFC chip by another, which could lead to cyber attack on a later communicating NCF enabled device.
Accordingly, there remains a need to develop a new article of jewelry that is able to combine precious metals, which are highly conductive, into NFC enabled jewelry. There also remains a need to provide security features for NFC chips embedded within jewelry.